DNEAVES

I don’t think Hello Games lied as much as you may think. Sony lied, and others layered their own expectations on top.

HG turned to Sony for publishing and marketing help. Sony, like any game publisher, wants to get as many sales as possible, preferrably on release day to look the best (for further marketing when sales slow down: “X million dollars on release day”/“Y copies sold on release day” kind of stuff). So Sony had a huge hand in promoting the game, and undoubtedly crunched time on HG, reducing their ability to get what they wanted to out the door.

Plus, people hear what they want to hear and read what they want to read sometimes. Game journalists and streamers and influencers and such layered their expectation on each other, chalking up the game to more than was promised by HG, only to be disappointed when it wasn’t. Murray even said the day before its release that it “maybe isn’t the game you imagined”.

And sure, not to absolve HG of all the blame here, there was underdelivery and bugs. They got swept up in a storm of shit larger than they were ready for. They probably could have said more at the bungled release, but I wonder how much (if any) they couldn’t because of Sony’s hands in the PR. Iirc they were allowing returns of the game past normal return timelines? Given all of that, though, they committed to their game, even when Sony left, and even if players left and didn’t come back. That’s why people talk about it’s comeback story.

For Cyberpunk, though, I’m less supportive of that comeback story because CDPR had other majorly-known games (Witcher). They knew how game-dev-crunching and publisher pressure reduces their ability to deliver. They understood how marketing grows hype and expectations of their games. They even saw how NMS’s release went, and they still fumbled their release horribly. I’m happy for those that play CP2077 and enjoy it today, but I’m less on-board for that one.

2026 update: we now give you the ability… to right click!

Hard at work, there

I think the shallowness of understanding also stems from the codebase itself, and moreso that than the Ai finding where something is.

A poorly organized codebase, dynamic file imports lsp’s can’t follow, lack of annotations on unclearly-named arguments, etc. are way worse for understanding a codebase than Ai saying “the thing you need is this method”, which Ai could also explain how it got there at least. At that point, Ai is a better than what they would have without it.

Write clean, understandable code. Document it, too. Everyone will thank you

Tbh, I’d love to be able to use this less for games and more for just Android apps.

I’d love to move more to a less-Google-owned mobile platform that still has the apps I use and the power to run things. I think the two frontrunners are like /e/OS or GrapheneOS.

But with Lepton: A) there’s a better chance of the idea of a Linux-non-Android phone, since Lepton could allow Android apps run on a Linux phone; or B) make Linux tablets better, again with Android apps.

I also have an idea in my head that next “upgrade” I can afford I’ll ditch my phone and go for a smartwatch (with 4G/5G) and a tablet (for apps). The best pairing is probably from Samsung, which unfortunately is both Android/Google and now focused on promoting AI features (ew). I’d go for GrapheneOS if I could put it on a tablet of suitable specs, and if a smartwatch would work well with it (which the watch would probably still be Samsung’s, but maybe RePebble can do something great?).

But if I could use a Linux tablet? That’s a computer at that point, and I could also benefit from having a laptop since there’s also things an Android device couldn’t do that a computer could (I’m a software dev, it’d be painful on Android). Waydroid/Lepton then supplements the part where there are things Android can do that computers can’t, which is just “apps the developer didn’t make a webapp/computer app for”. Still would have to figure out the watch part, but it’s a start

Not HDMI-out, you need some USB-C <-> HDMI cable. Preferrably a dock since there’s only one USB-C on the Deck. But otherwise, yes: plug it into a TV and it’ll display on the TV, connect a bluetooth controller and you basically have a console.

I was just hoping Steam Controllers were still around to be that controller

With the Steam Deck’s success, I’m surprised the Steam Controller didn’t return, as I think it would be an excellent companion controller for couch-mode gaming. I’d buy 4 of 'em.

Functional language developers are obsessed with side effects but I rarely ever see problems with it in real code. Like I can remember once in maybe 10 years setting a developer write a “get” method that also wrote to a file. Caught during code review, rewritten easily.

While, sure, get methods writing files could happen in side-effectful code, the side-effect concern is less about that and more of expectations. With OOP languages, class methods can create a dichotomy of expected returns: Using a list reversal as an example, will a list.reverse(some_list) function reverse the list in-place, or return a copy of the reversed list and leave the original in-tact? To know the answer, you have to check the docs or the type signature (which, yes, is easy, but the answer isn’t obvious). Which, the main concern is trying to debug things “magically changing”, since nested function calls and inherited function calls can modify something from layers upon layers of abstraction away.

FP languages tend to not have this dichotomy, with very few exceptions like IO in Haskell, ports in Elm and Gren, external functions in Gleam, or FFI in Haskell, to name some ways from languages I know, all of which usually move the control of the program outside the language’s “default area”, anyway. Outside the exceptions, to reverse a list a reverse function needs to be given that list explicitly, and it also will be returning a copy of the list reversed, only and always

“It’s just a prank, bro!”

-them, probably

I’m glad. “Prank” videos are awful. A good prank or joke is enjoyed and laughed about by all parties, without incentive or provokation. This is public disruption that some people somehow find funny.